Spiritual Healing: If the spirit moves you

Could spiritual healing be the key to alleviating the suffering of patients who have long-term disorders or are in extreme pain? Clare Rudebeck meets the people who believe it could

As Martin Turner lay on the couch, the spiritual healer's hands hovered a few inches above his body. He was in constant pain from a back injury and, although sceptical, felt he had nothing to lose. Physiotherapy and osteopathy hadn't helped. Surgery seemed the only other option. Suddenly, he felt something move in his spine like two bones clunking together. "I haven't got an explanation for why it worked," says Turner, a maintenance engineer from Uffculme in Devon. "But after 10 sessions with my healer, the pain had gone and I was playing football again."

He was referred to the healer by his GP, Dr Michael Dixon. "A lot of my patients were seeing healers privately and said they were getting better, so I decided we should work with them," says Dixon. Spiritual healers have now been a fixture in his surgery in Cullompton, Devon, for 10 years. They have been particularly successful with long-term illnesses such as eczema, depression, psoriasis, stress-related conditions and chronic pain.

Turner's healer, Therese Seward, has been working at the surgery one morning a week for five years. Patients are referred to her by the GPs, often when conventional medicine has failed to improve their condition. She says spiritual healing can help any illness. "I have one patient at the moment who's had shingles. It had left him with an eye condition. The eye was gradually closing and eye-drops weren't providing a long-term solution," she says. "Now he's gone five weeks with hardly any drops."

She also gets referrals from local health visitors for babies with colic. "The mothers are desperate and medically there seems to be nothing to relieve the symptoms," she says. "Normally I give the babies three sessions and the symptoms just go."

Seward is one of a growing number of spiritual healers who now work in National Health Service surgeries and hospitals. Angie Buxton is employed by a cancer unit at University College Hospital, London. She has treated hundreds of patients during her three years there and says that her sessions help to relieve pain, lessen the side-effects of cancer drugs and ease depression.

Linda Moore, 48, had regular sessions with her while undergoing treatment for kidney cancer last year. "It was wonderful," she says. "You can't explain the terrible pain you go through with cancer. They didn't have a painkiller that would help, but after I'd had the healing, the pain was much better." In October 2000, she was told she had a month to live. She is now in partial remission and out of hospital. It is impossible to tell what difference the spiritual healing made to her condition, but Linda believes that it helped.

There are now more than 6,000 registered spiritual healers in the UK, of which a handful works in NHS surgeries and hospitals. Their work is regulated by a code of conduct set down by the National Federation of Spiritual Healers. Accordingly, healers never touch a patient without permission, or encourage them to stop using conventional medicine. NFSH is not associated with any religion, believing that every healer has the right to "his or her own interpretation of the source [of the healing]".

"My remit is to channel energy," explains Buxton. Like other spiritual healers, she does this by lightly touching a patient or holding her hands just above him or her. She is not religious and says she is simply tapping into "energy that's all around us". Seward, on the other hand, believes that the energy does come from "a higher source".

A session with a spiritual healer normally lasts for half an hour. The patient is asked to sit or lie down, close their eyes and keep still. "I explain to people beforehand that they will feel a deep sense of relaxation," says Seward. This can have several effects on a person. "Some people fall asleep. Some feel very hot or cold. Sometimes their stomach starts to rumble," she says. At the start of the session she puts her hands lightly on the patient's shoulders and "senses where there's a problem". She then works with her hands above these areas and also above places where the patient is reporting pain.

Predictably, there is still much scepticism about spiritual healing. Dr Dixon, while convinced of the therapy's health benefits, does not believe that a specific energy transfer from healer to patient is involved during treatment. "I believe it is a means of the brain producing its own chemicals to heal the body, rather than the patient being given them in a tablet," he says.

A study carried out at his surgery showed that 22 out of 27 patients reported an improvement in their symptoms after a 10-week course of healing. But this may have been simply due to the placebo effect – the patients' condition may have improved because of the psychological effect of having someone willing them to get better. Dr Dixon says it doesn't matter if that is the case. "As a pragmatist, I don't care what makes my patients feel more positive and lessens their symptoms," he says.

But if spiritual healers are to become more widely accepted in mainstream medicine, they need the weight of clinical studies behind them. Aberdeen University is currently carrying out an NHS-funded study into the effect of spiritual healing on asthma sufferers. In an attempt to separate the human and spiritual effects of the treatment, one group of patients is seeing healers, while the other is being treated by actors posing as healers. Results are expected early next year, but the study's lead researcher Stan Gerard – who is also a healer – says current indications are encouraging. "Volunteers say they feel 'very relaxed' and that their breathing is 'much better'," he says. He claims that healing has already had a positive effect on asthma sufferers whom he has treated privately.

Whether spiritual healing will become more widely available on the NHS could ultimately lie in patients' hands. Dr Dixon says that his initiative was "patient-led", and a spokesperson for the Department of Health says that while it would not "promote" the therapy, doctors are free to decide "whether a particular form of spiritual healing could be of benefit to an individual patient".

The National Federation of Spiritual Healing (0845 1232777); Stan Gerard is at the Hale Clinic (0870 167 6667)